As part of the preparations for 080808 Upstage Festival, there will be Match-making sessions and open training at the following dates and times:

Match-Making Sessions: April 16, 9:00 am UK, 8:00 pm NZ - find your local time here + April 16/17, 10:00 pm (Wednesday) UK, 9:00 am (Thursday) NZ - find your local time here + April 23, 12 noon UK, 11:00 pm NZ - find your local time here. Come to the matchmaking session if you would like to find collaborators for an 080808 performance, or collaborate on someone else’s performance. Continue reading

The winners of the Turbulence supported ShiftSpace Commissions Program have been announced. In The Space category the winners are:

1st Place - Yeas & Nays: A ShiftSpace widget for calling representatives by Christian Croft ($2000) - A ShiftSpace that allows a citizen to call her representative from any webpage, record her call and publish it on that very page. Yeas & Nays attempts to promote civic responsibility and a democratic discourse and make our citizen duty just a bit easier. This space combines ShiftSpace’s power to layer commentary above existing contexts with advances in VoIP telephony to build a tool for informed civic action. It layers the citizen’s act of calling an official on top of online information substantiating her argument. Continue reading

AREA 10 Project Space, Peckham presents () RE | BOOT - the launch event of Area10’s new media media platform: AREA 10: MEDIALAB /> :: Live Event and Opening: April 12, 2008; 7:00 pm - film screenings, live performances, interactions, vjing, sound art, experimental and electronic noise music :: April 11-12; 11 am - 5 pm - activities include workshops, lectures presentations being held alongside an exhibition of digital and interactive arts :: Area 10 Project Space, Eagle Wharf, Peckham Square, London SE15 5JT (White building behind Peckham Library). Continue reading

Fundamentalism vs Evolution- another dilemma of coexistence DIWOlogue 2 - a live networked performance :: March 20, 2008; 8:00 pm (2 am GMT) :: online in Visitorsstudio :: As part of the Liminal Screen Programme, Colab-lab, JPL Building, BMNI, Banff, Canada.

A 30 minute performance will be given by Marc Garrett and Ruth Catlow. The mix will then open up for everyone who is logged in to Visitorsstudio to join in. The title for the performance is inspired by a silent news reel from 1925 called ‘Fundamentalism vs Evolution’ by the Topical Film Company, UK 1925, released last year by the BFI Creative Archive Licence Group. Continue reading

Turbulence Commission: iPak - 10,000 songs, 10,000 images, 10,000 abuses curated and engendered by Ajaykumar.

iPak - 10,000 songs, 10,000 images, 10,000 abuses (iPak) is a playful, inter-active and participatory art work, that integrates your creativity, the random generation of works by a computer, and art engendered by Ajaykumar. iPak synthesises conceptual innovation, social engagement and therapeutic process: generative art as re-generative force; art-making as a medicine; inspiration emerging from tragedy; and the notion that social factors — such as marginalisation and racism — cause mental illness. Continue reading

Call for Contributions: free103point9 Transmission Art Archive - A participatory online initiative toward defining the genre :: Deadline: March 15, 2008 :: free103point9 defines Transmission Arts as a conceptual umbrella that unites a community of artists and audiences interested in transmission ideas and tools. This genre encompasses a diversity of practices and media working with the idea of transmission or the physical properties of the electromagnetic spectrum. Transmission art is generally a participatory live-art or time-based art, and often manifests as radio art, video art, light sculpture, installation, and performance. Continue reading

Hipic - all the time and forever on hipic.org - and @ ShanghArt, Long March Space, Boers-Li Gallery, Beijing Art Now Gallery, and Beijing Commune Beijing, China.

In this period of pictures flowing, an innovative artistic experimental project provides to everyone the opportunity of showing their own pictures. Hipic is an independent artistic project centered on pictures initiated by Yang Zhenzhong, Xu Zhen, Huang Kui and other artists, who established the Hipic team. Hipic collects and displays flood of pictures from all over the world using internet as a platform. Hipic’s central system, diffuses pictures on various visual poles, including public screens, TV monitors, computer, mobile screens, and other mediums, which undoubtedly became part of everyone”s life. Continue reading

Turbulence Commission: The ShiftSpace Commissions Program by Dan Phiffer and Mushon Zer-Aviv - Turbulence has commissioned ShiftSpace and now ShiftSpace commissions you. ONLY 5 DAYS LEFT TO APPLY!

Ten development grants of up to $2,000 will be awarded to individuals and collectives using ShiftSpace as a platform to create new “Spaces” and “Trails”.

About ShiftSpace: While the Internet’s design is widely understood to be open and distributed, control over how users interact online has given us largely centralized and closed systems. The web is undergoing a transformation whose promise is user empowerment - but who controls the terms of this new read / write web? The web has followed the physical movement of the city’s social center from the (public) town square to the (private) mall. ShiftSpace attempts to subvert this trend by providing a new public space on the web. Continue reading

Upstage Walk-Through :: March 5, 2008; 9 pm European time (find your local time here).

The next open walk-through will be held in French, kindly led by Suzon Fuks (Belgium/Australia). To participate, go here. If you want to log in and learn how to use the tools, you must email helen [at] upstage.org.nz for a log in prior to the session. The open walk-through is an opportunity for interested people to get an introduction into how UpStage works, and how you can use it to create live online performances.

Last summer, Cati Vaucelle at Architectradure tipped me off about Meta-Markets, a project which created a means to buy and sell units of social media. I penned an enthusiastic review of the project in the fall and continue to be engaged by this ongoing thought-experiment. Meta-Markets was authored by Burak Arikan, a graduate of the MIT Media Lab who is currently based in Brooklyn. This Friday, Burak will be taking part in a panel discussion entitled Real World Implications of Virtual Economies at the Turbulence Mixed Realities Exhibition and Symposium in Boston (and streaming live in Second Life). Continue reading